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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

"It seems incredible that normal human beings not only tolerate the average American restaurant food, but actually prefer it to eating at home. The only possible explanation for such deliberate mass poisoning, a kind of suicide of the spirit as well as the body is that meals in the immediacy of the dining room or kitchen are unbearable.

...There can be no warm, rich home life anywhere else if it does not exist at table."

MFK Fisher, Love in a Dish (House Beautiful, 1948)

Vince and I have not been married for very long, and we have lived together for less time than that. But sitting down and sharing our evening meal is a high point of the day, when it happens - we have divergent schedules. But we do not find each other's company unbearable. Today we realized that we have not eaten out together once this year since returning from Cape Town in March. And we haven't missed it. We eat at home. And the food is very good. I shop almost every day for the small details of each meal, and few take more than 30 minutes to prepare. I mention this because a new wave of helpful cooks is telling us that dinner is possible with 30 minutes' work. So what's new? Saying it is in itself a sort of inflicted pressure. Like being told to grow edible things even though we've been doing that for years. It's just that now that They have found out about it, We feel under pressure to do it more...loudly?

Of course for the cooking at home you need a basic pantry (mine is about 2 cubic feet), and of course you need a freezer and a fridge to cut down on your shopping time. But it is the daily lemon, or bunch of parsley, or single red onion, or perfect pineapple, that lends the magic to what you already have. I do not have meal plans. I have desire.

And what you need for that dinner, above all, is the willingness to please and to be pleased.

"The way in which mealtimes are passed is most important to what happiness we find in life."

BrillatSavarin

I bought a volume of MFK's hitherto uncollected works, A Stew or a Story (2007). I had no idea there was anything by this woman that I had not read. In fact I'd been on a diet for years. I haven't read any of her work, or her letters, for at least five years. I think I was afraid of beginning to absorb her by osmosis, and to lose track of where she ended and I began. Where does one's own shape begin? Where do our teacher's shapes end?

But now there's more to read, and I will lose myself in recognition, dog-earing pages like mad, and stopping at the butchers to buy a big steak...

"...slapped onto a grill as hot as hell-fire and as searing. No turning fork would ever prick it and when it would finally be carved into long thin slices at the table, its juices would gush from it the color of garnets."

..and turning the town upside down for some perfect watercress.

And that is how I cook a steak. And yet it was Hemingway who taught me about the watercress, long before I knew anything. About how shocked the French were that these cafes would dare to serve bifsteak with watercress. No sauce!

He could write about food. I haven't read Hemingway in ten years; almost: eight. His sentences became so short. So I read Faulkner as an antidote. Hemingway ate better.

Yet I never used an MFK recipe. Quite the opposite with Elizabeth David, whose writing sang in the recipes. MFK writes about food and humans, Elizabeth David teaches technique without ever letting on that she is doing so. Imagine them both at the same table. I am not aware that they ever mentioned the other. Singular, brilliant, beautiful women. They would hate each other. Why?

And I have lost my drift. I'm just happy to have found the book. And just a little afraid. I might find a lot of Mary Frances in the things that I had begun to think of as Marie.

For the rest of the week's blog I intend to get back to South Africa. We have mountain kingdoms and a frightening pass, flowers in the mist, racing dassies, dust roads and a flood, endless plains and their African light, and an utterly delicious tomato bredie cooked in the coals, as well as...the biker from Patensie.

it's all becoming quite silly.... common sense seems to have been bred out of humans over the years...

Nobody knows about basic foods..or prepares meals ..or even wants to do so anymore. They'd much rather eat at those mediocre restaurants... ... ingesting tons of gloppy fats and wondering why their bodies begin to resemble just that. Then, claim no time to cook because they must go to the gym...... sigh....

Food, since ancient times, has been the currency of love.To have it so demeaned by bean counters and chemists and lazy eaters is to...make me reach for my Ada Boni or Elizabeth David or Jane Grigson.I'm not much of a cook, but I do respect what I eat.

so "eg"... having grown up with "an ordentlike bord kos" I feel lucky not to have experienced the era of processing and packaging, was a wide-eyed (gobsmacked) wonderer when first encountering pancakes with blueberries included!! in a cardboard box? How did this become food? and we might need a rant on the impact of the microwave on home cooks.....

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood. "Yes, it is certified now."

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

The garden paths were lit by coloured lamps, as is the custom in Italy, and the supper table was laden with candles and flowers, as is the custom in all countries where they understand how to dress a table, which when properly done is the rarest of all luxuries.

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

(Mrs Cadwallader to Dorothea)

"I know it's a great temptation to go mad, but don't go in for it, you wouldn't like it."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

"A is for dining Alone...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my ever-increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an act that should not be indulged in lightly."

MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran with them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Richard Chaston (1620-1695). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?